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Comment by maxander | Hacker News Reader

Remember that, a priori, you should be far more skeptical of studies with this sort of result than, say, studies showing that neocortinoids don't harm bees or that the latest blockbuster pharmaceutical has no side effects. The sheer mass of money in position to lobby for the "fossil fuel use is fine!" position dwarfs that of all other financially-fraught research questions put together.

To wit; the company behind the paper in question, Carbon Engineering, is noted by Wikipedia as having "oil sands financier N. Murray Edwards" as one of it's principal backers. And the article's "outside expert's opinion" quote comes from Stephen Pacal, co-director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton- which has an "extended partnership with BP" worth a great deal of money [1]. The financial conflicts behind this research are staggering.

[1] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/11/18/carbon-mitigation-...

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this is kind of interesting as there's some reverse/upside down ideas that come out of it:

1. the big oil companies and the massive political machine that supports them drops the whole "global warming isn't real" line, no more snowballs being taken in to congress and all that. Because now they can just say they'll suck it out of the air and they can continue to think they can keep burning all the coal and oil they want (which of course they should not). Once everyone is on the same page that global warming is real, they can't go back on that. If the approach here proves to be insufficient (which it probably is), a lot of political points have been scored in any case.

2. the machinery to suck out the CO2 is another big "green" industry, like solar or wind, but doesn't compete with oil/coal! it's meant to mitigate the damage they do. So as you've noted, way more money and attention might end up going here, increasing the chance of its viability.

3. No matter what happens with the rate of burning oil/coal, we need this anyway. There's consensus that we're pretty much over the point of no return with warming due to all the ice that has melted, and if the permafrost goes that might be catastrophic.

Is anyone actually debating if climate change is happening? The debate is on the degree of human influence.

Now. 5 years ago it was if it is even happening

Of course they are, including nearly half of US politicians. There are people in this thread that are unsure if humans are even increasing CO2 levels.

This is a political debate, not a scientific debate. And the political debates mean stating the most extreme position that's within the realm of plausibility. Or having others say even more extreme things to move the window of plausibility.

It's hard making some people understand that such debates go beyond the scope of science (or that there's anything beyond the score of science for that matter) :/

Even better: there are politicians(0) and 'leaders'(1) in the US who still outright deny that it (climate change) is a thing. One of them is even head of the EPA. lol.

0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

1. https://www.factcheck.org/2016/11/trump-on-climate-change/

Maybe I'm missing something, but can you point to a line in [1] where Trump outright denies climate change is a thing? I see a lot of qualified statements like "climate change is a 'very complex subject'" and "Trump said there is 'some connectivity.'"

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/26589529219124838...

Sure, but not from fact-check. I'm sure I could also dig up more if I spent more than a minute searching:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/26589529219124838...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/40897761692683059...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/42722642498738585...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/42841411346395545...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/42841832366016512...

Others have beat me to it, but gosh, you really don't have to try very hard at all to find examples of him denying that it's a thing.

One can reasonably question if climate changes can be reasonably measured over a 150 year time frame. At a geological scale climate change has been ongoing for about 4 and a half billion years. Saying that the latest .3333x10^(-6)% of that data stream is sufficient to deduce a new trend is pretty amazing if true.

On the other hand processes like glaciation and desertification can happen with alarming rapidity. Supposedly the former can occur in less than a year http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1227990/Ice-A.... Those are two kinds of climate change that I consider cause for concern. The dust bowl was a big deal. And then there are things like super volcano eruptions.

Having more historical data to draw on makes us more confident that the null hypothesis is invalid, not less. If the question is reasonable, then the answer is an immediate, equally reasonable: yes; we've done the measurements; the data is there; the trends are clear.

During the last ice age there is evidence that suggests the Earth's temperature rose 10-15 degrees in less than 10 years. In fact, during the last 110k years represented in the Greenland Ice Sheet Project the climate shifted dramatically multiple times over periods of a few years to maybe a couple of dozen years. During the last 110k years the most stable has been the last 11k years, which is kind of just dumb good luck for us living today.

Current anthropomorphic climate change models suggest we might see 2-3 degree changes in 100 years. I believe the science is likely accurate here. I support moving towards renewables and just about anything else generally supported by the climate change crowd. However, I think the panic button has been pushed a little too hard on this issue. I think things like overfishing the ocean and even plastics in the ocean are going to be bigger problems in the short run than human caused climate change.

Generally speaking this kind of nuance isn't allowed. The kind of response that says "If water rises a few feet, move a few feet inland, you've got a century of notice. If you have to farm over there instead of over here, then farm over there instead." is sacrilegious. To many, I would be considered a "climate denier."

I think this is even more alarming:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

The economic impact on the United States alone will be in the trillions. Relocating all of Manhattan, Toronto, London, Singapore, and other coastal economic centers is non-trivial, but would hopefully be gradual enough to be viable. It would be fantastic if we can avoid this loss of wealth by making a meaningful reduction in the rate of global warming.

Other nations are already experiencing famine due to permanent desertification. This has already exacerbated political and military conditions; drought is a major factor in the Syrian and other war zones.

To compare this to the range of human history is not meaningful. "They had it worse" isn't helpful for now. What matters is our response to the conditions that we are expected to experience.

Around the 120,000 BCE time, there was a "great filter" event that caused the mass death of most of humanity, causing a massive reduction in human genetic diversity. Yes, we may have it "easier," but today's problems are still real and must be dealt with.

I think it's useful to frame the climate change process solely in terms of human impact, and specifically economic, political, and security terms to governments.

I wouldn't consider you a denier, and it's important to share your perspective. I hope you consider mine.

The cost of the Iraq war is in the trillions. A cynic could argue that that war happened to secure burnable fossil fuels.

It isn't obvious that the cost being in the trillions is cause to blanch - at the scale we are talking, the cost of mitigating with more expensive energy is also likely to be in the trillions.

You might benefit from being more specific about how many trillions.

> the big oil companies and the massive political machine that supports them drops the whole "global warming isn't real" line

They dropped that a few years ago

https://www.shell.co.uk/sustainability/environment/climate-c...

http://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/current-issues/climate-po...

https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability/climat...

Although... https://www.citgo.com/NewsViews/CITGOViews/GlobalWarming.jsp

From the Shell link:

Gas can help with all three of the UK’s energy objectives – providing affordable, secure and low carbon energy.

Gas is none of those things. It’s not cheap, it’s going to run out, and it isn’t low carbon.

All true. But note that GP didn't say that they've stopped spinning started speaking the complete truth about fossil fuels--only that they have stopped denying its link to global warming.

You can replace the reason any corporation does things with $profit and it will almost always make sense.

This is somewhat true, though obviously misleading.

Since natural gas's energy efficiency is much higher than that of coal or oil, the amount of carbon dioxide released is the same for a greater amount of energy. Furthermore, it requires less carbon input to retrieve the natural gas.

Also, in order to use solar or especially wind, you need a form of electricity generation which can ramp up quickly when the wind dies. Until we get large-scale battery storage, that means natural gas turbines.

Some gas is renewable, though, so definitely low carbon. And over here it's even fairly cheap (for vehicles, considerably cheaper than gasoline).

It is cheap - see the huge fall in gas prices since the introduction of fracking. The US has gone from being a net importer of natural gas to an exporter, such is the increase in supply.

"Secure" doesn't mean "is never going to run out", but rather that we don't have to rely on other countries from it. The UK can meet some of its natural gas needs with local fracking, reducing the need to import gas.

(And other commenters have addressed the low carbon thing)

Citgo is de facto an arm of the Venezuelan government, so of course it stands in favor of carbon credit schemes whose net effect is funneling money yo Venezuela.

> They dropped that a few years ago

They say they dropped it, or they stopped funding conservative think tanks and pols?

I don't know about big oil, but the machine continues. The WSJ published this editorial in the last week:

Climate Change Has Run Its Course

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-has-run-its-cour...

And they charge you money to read it, how nice of them! I hope they spend it on solar panels.

If you google for the title and click through, the WSJ will let you read the article.

But frankly, it's not worth it.

TLDR: Climate change is past its peak as a cause because it's being co-mingled with other social justice concerns and because of concern fatigue.

CEO of Canada's largest oil company: "Suncor CEO slams climate change deniers, politicians who cater to them"

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/suncor-ceo-slams-clima...

Choice quotes:

"It is a matter of profound disappointment to me that science and economics have taken on some strange political ownership"

"Climate change is science. Hardcore science."

"It makes sense to consume things sensibly. Common sense is not a big part of the conversation that normally goes on on this thing."

I think the strategy is changing from denial...

> way more money and attention might end up going here, increasing the chance of its viability.

This has no chance of ever being viable. Reducing energy usage is way more efficient than 'mitigating' carbon. And if you wanted to mitigate carbon, it costs $0.03 cents per ton just to reduce deforestation, whereas this costs $94 per ton.

Here's a dollar. Who can I pay it to so that 30 tons of forest get saved ?

It doesn't matter about the estimated costs of something (feel free to share sources also) if people aren't going to actually do the thing. Even the most extreme and fully impossible reduction of carbon emissions, like banning all cars on Earth (which would also have immense social and economic costs in itself) will not reverse the problem now. All strategies must be employed at once.

There are non profits that do things like buy land for conservation. I don't know which ones are efficient and effective so I won't try to name a specific one.

> Once everyone is on the same page that global warming is real, they can't go back on that

I'm not sure that's true, at least in the US. The extent to which "post-truth" has become a meaningful phrase since 2016 is disheartening.

And of course, the cynical would say that it doesn't matter. If carbon-pollution lobbyists can go from "it isn't real" to "it isn't a problem" then they will have achieved their goal. This is true whether or not these technologies are technically or economically feasible.

Getting excited about an imagined giant CO2-fixing industry is the broken windows fallacy on a planetary scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

The worry is that the discussion will create a false sense of future security, undermining current mitigation efforts. Or worse; that hope for future technological options can be politically weaponized to undermine more immediate actions. There are plenty of entrenched interests that have immense short-term incentives to do just that. Climate engineering will eventually help us mitigate some of the consequences. Some form is pretty much assumed as a given necessity even. But there are major mitigation efforts to be undertaken now. The earlier we mitigate the effects, the less extreme the interventions with climate engineering will need to be in the future.

Because no matter how much the price for direct air capture (DAC) falls in the future, it's still going to be massive. The submitted paper estimates a current cost of between $94 and $232 per ton. That's a big drop from a decade ago on a per ton basis, but it's still massive overall. At the low end you're looking at a minimum of ~$1.34 trillion annually if we were able to capture 100% of the 32.5 GtC of emissions accumulated in the atmosphere in 2017 alone. That's also completely ignoring the total ~230 GtC of the same since 1870 as well as emissions absorbed by the land and oceans (which has its own negative effects).

Nobody expects to remove all of it, or even all of what we'll continue to emit via DAC. Just keeping the expected increase to under the 2°C degree upper limit agreed to in the Paris Agreement is going to be challenging in itself even with cheaper, more efficient DAC methods. Actually reversing the temperature changes would be the "dream" for climate engineering. Something like that--which would involve every type of carbon dioxide removal methods along with atmospheric and space-based solar radiation management--would be a herculean project on a scale the human race has never before attempted. It'd make the Apollo program look like a five year old with a lemonade stand. And eventually, we'll have to figure out a way to make real progress on that front.

Basically, the hope that climate engineering will allow us to fix it later--or better yet, the dream that we can reverse it altogether--is both appealing and potentially dangerous. Why sacrifice today when we'll figure it out tomorrow? Just look at US infrastructure spending for an example of that kind of thinking.

Not sure how accurate but napkin maths and quick google suggest barrel of oil produces 118 kg of co2. So about 9 barrels to produce a ton. Barrel is $67. So cost of capture might add 15% to 38% to cost of oil.

the ~$100 per ton of CO2 is only to capture CO2 to the form of K2CO3, the energy cost to convert this to fuel will be much more!

I believe what the poster was implying is that in a future scheme, the cost of carbon capture would be directly added to the cost of the fuel. This is in line with other extraction industries, e.g. logging, where the loggers must plant replacement trees. The cost of that replacement is incorporated into that of the lumber, wood pulp, etc.

In the future (where all fuel is manufactured by energy from renewables), the price of carbon fuel would simply be the price of manufacture: capturing CO2 and energizing it into fuel. Or are we celebratinng the fact that some people learned about objective energetic cost today? Capturing CO2 has never been hard, and to make the analogy with the loggers planting trees more complete, the price component due to capture would be almost nothing compared to the price component of turning CO2 into fuel which would make up the majority of the price of this future fuel.

And how do you get enough substrates, plus how expensive and energy intensive they are?

This is not correct. A barrel of oil is 118kg of pure carbon but when burning this translate to roughly 450kg of CO2 (because carbon combines with heavier oxygen to form CO2)

This is without taking into account the CO2 that is emitted to extract the oil from the ground.

Yes, the simple "rule of thumb" is "the resulting CO2 is 3 times heavier than the gasoline burned." Because chemistry. H weights "almost nothing" (in the engineering approximation sense, to the first order of magnitude) in hydrocarbons, and the weight of a single CO2 molecule (made of two oxygen atoms, one carbon atom) is roughly 3 times the weight of C atom alone (again as a good enough simple approximation, it's a little more, but C alone is a little lighter than O, so all together with the starting H, everything comes to 3).

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-weight-ra...

For those who like more exact calculation: one molecule of C8H18 (octane) weights approx 8 * 12+18=114 masses of H, only that one molecule will produce when burnt 8 CO2 molecules, which weight 8 * 12+2 * 8 * 16=352, and 352/114 ~ 2.98 ~ 3

I looked up how much volume a tonne of CO2 takes at average temp/pressure.

A sphere with a diameter of 10M.

That's an insane volume when you think about it.

I think there is an easy way kill this DAC concept. Have a tax on fossil fuels that in 10 years time ramps up to the cost of capturing CO2. The government will use this tax to buy services of companies that do this. Big companies can also capture CO2 themselves and pay less tax (or get a refund) if they can prove they did so.

This way, you can bet on DAC becoming cheap, or you can invest in renewables.

> easy way ... tax on fossil fuels

I'm not sure those two phrases belong in the same paragraph, for the same exact reasons stated by the gp.

The Paris Climate models (1.5 degrees and 2 degrees) assumes that we are going have to remove a lot of carbon. This is not an either or - we need to both move to a carbon-free economy and remove carbon

> we need to both move to a carbon-free economy and remove carbon

We need to move to a net negative carbon economy (not carbon free, net negative), or find ways to reduce input heat (reflecting sunlight basically).

"At the low end you're looking at a minimum of ~$1.34 trillion annually if we were able to capture 100% of the 32.5 GtC of emissions accumulated in the atmosphere in 2017 alone."

Just $1.34 trillion for the recycling of carbon of an entire year like 2017 is crazy cheap. Once installed, the machines can recycle every year for much less money. One has to wonder why it has not been done alreday.

Compare with:

Annual global fossil fuel subsidies amounting to $5.3 trillion in 2015 (6.5% of global GDP): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X1...

Dr. Mark Skidmore – $21 Trillion Missing from US Federal Budget: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CwpjIwwI9o

> One has to wonder why it has not been done alreday.

Psychology, I think. We’re not, as a species, good with numbers like that. Brexit was fought over a much smaller sum, both gross and as a percentage of the economy.

IMO lack of knowledge, lack of technology (e.g. affordable electric cars), bad contracts, conservative politicians (and voters) and corrupt politicians.

Corrupt in the sense of personal profit (including lucrative talks and positions in companies and donations by companies) and profit for established national companies.

> The worry is that the discussion will create a false sense of future security,

A false sense of future security already exists, but on the opposite side! I'm sick of hearing people complaining about pollution and how we should switch to greener energy, without ever specifying which such magic green source of energy we may use!

I hear a lot about electric cars, but it's not clear to me what is an acceptable way to refill those batteries: burning oil in big thermal stations instead of private engines? Nuclear? New dams for hydroelectric?

When will people swallow the fact that our current lifestyle depends on the availability of cheap energy and that such energy has to be taken somewhere? Please, let's stop saying stupidly just "no". Let's rather look for alternatives and we'll all be happier!

This approach is also risky. We don't know what climate effects might fall out of very fast, very localized changes in the composition of the atmosphere. What's it going to do to the climate if we suck a bunch of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in one localized place? Could it change air movement patterns? Cause extreme weather events as the atmosphere moves around to remix itself?

I don't know if any modeling has been done on this (or if modeling it is even possible), but I'd be very worried about unintended side effects with the large scale, intensive application of this sort of technology.

https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...

'As you can see, in either scenario, global emissions must peak and begin declining immediately. For a medium chance to avoid 1.5 degrees, the world has to zero out net carbon emissions by 2050 or so — for a good chance of avoiding 2 degrees, by around 2065.

After that, emissions have to go negative. Humanity has to start burying a lot more carbon than it throws up into the atmosphere. There are several ways to sequester greenhouse gases, from reforestation to soil enrichment to cow backpacks, but the backbone of the envisioned negative emissions is BECCS, or bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration.

BECCS — raising, harvesting, and burning biomass for energy, while capturing and burying the carbon emissions — is unproven at scale. Thus far, most demonstration plants of any size attaching CCS to fossil fuel facilities have been over-budget disasters. What if we can’t rely on it? What if it never pans out?

"If we want to avoid depending on unproven technology becoming available," the authors say, "emissions would need to be reduced even more rapidly."'

An alternative motive, which makes slightly more sense to me, is that oil and gas companies have a vested interest in developing this kind of technology because that's the only way their business will survive in the long run. Fooling people (including the editors of peer-reviewed scientific journals) with spurious research into CO2 recapture methods seems about as hard, and still not as effective, as actually developing those methods.

Plus, if they successfully develop the technology, they get to run two complementary businesses instead of just one, kind of like owning a bar with a pay toilet.

I think that the much cheaper solution is neither to develop the technology nor fool people with fake research, but fund real research into areas where the economics probably won't work. (Which could be the whole field.) As we've seen with Theranos, and with plenty of smaller companies [1], it's easy enough to spend years taking investor money for things people want to exist but are probably or definitely impossible. That would get carbon polluters many years of delay. For corporate execs, that's plenty of time. And hey, a miracle might happen.

That said, fooling people is a well-established business of its own. It started with the tobacco companies, but it sure hasn't ended there. [2] So they might be sticking with the tried and true playbook here.

[1] E.g., this excellent blog on wireless charging companies: https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Doubt-Their-Product-Industrys-Threate...

Meh. Anyone with serious expertise in an area will have "ties" to the relevant industry.

If people with such ties are untrustworthy, that means no experts can be trusted, and all you're left with is the uninformed and various angry activists.

I'll take my chances with well informed experts who are possibly not perfectly impartial.

Meh. You’ll only take your chances with someone who absolutely has conflicts of interest is what you’re really saying.

No, what they're saying is that conflicts of interest are so common and mundane that they don't have much signal on their own.

When corporate grants are bringing research groups into existence more or less from scratch, it's fair to call it more than "ties." At the very least, this is far beyond the norm in fields I keep track of- for instance, pharmaceutical companies helping fund academic biomedical research happens, certainly, but only in limited cases and generally it's considered a significant asterisk next to whatever the study finds. When those same companies are carrying out their own research (say, clinical trials for a new drug) they typically do so under external supervision, with rigorous reporting standards.

For that matter, the choice isn't between oil-industry experts and complete novices. Carbon capture is chemistry; there are plenty of chemical engineers with independently-funded academic positions, or involved in non-oil-industry funded companies. If some of them published a review of the plausibility of carbon capture, I'd listen to it.

But there is no advantage here to produce FUD. In fact it acknowledges the primary problems of fossil fuels, not deny them. They are not seeking FDA approval on a drug, or trying to show that CO2 makes us smarter and healthier. I won't use more gas now because of this article. However, if they can do it (and they have for several years in a test), then we can slow the rate of new carbon, while the growth of solar continues to grow, I think it is a potential win for us, and for a company able to do it.

You will absolutely use more gas because of this article. Just the headline out there will have an effect (since people tend to remember mostly the headlines). When your local enviro-hippie comes and starts asking you to fly less, drive less, buy local, save energy, etc... -- you'll have just slightly less incentive to do that. "What's the big deal", you'll say. "We can just suck the CO2 out of the air."

I think this is exactly the effect that fossil fuel companies hope the FUD will produce.

It ignores the energy cost to turn the damn CO2 into fuel. If we had a cost effective way to BOTH capture CO2 AND turn it into fuel, then we wouldn't be drilling for fuel..

It ignores the atmospheric CO2 that is no longer abosrbed by the greenhouse plants by feeding them this CO2: in this sense its $100 dollar per tonne CO2 more expensive than letting the greenhouse plants extract it themselves!

It's just a good news show, now nature.com is doing it too!

I hear you, and in terms of the merits of this particular study I'm sure your skepticism is well-grounded; I share it. But, it's also worth considering the perspective of the "Big Oil" executives. Thought experiment: imagine you're such an exec, and you recognize that the future of your company (in fact, your whole industry), depends on evolving beyond oil, to become an _energy_ company, embracing (and innovating in, and profiting from) renewable sources. What do you do? How do you start? I am NOT repeat NOT an apologist for the selfish idiot criminals (insert unprintables here) who effectively destroy the planet for personal gain. And yes the fossil fuel industry as a whole has a horrible and well-deserved reputation. But some of these entities are going to adapt and change, and for better or worse they're going to play a role in how our species relates to the planet. So I think it's really important to remain skeptical, but without ruling out, out of hand, the possibility that ties to the energy industry are not an automatic disqualifier for real science and progress.

It's a question of scale, the oil industry is vast. Exxon has ~1/4 of a trillion dollars per year in revenue while profits swing they tend to be very good over time.

Renewables on the other hand are fractured. Do they go for Wind, Solar, Batteries, Bio fuels, or what? It's not that hard to keep Exxon alive through this transition, but you also need to keep it huge and profitable which is very tricky.

IMO, they might be better off going into chemistry or engineering because being an energy company sounds fine there is little connection between renewables and oil. But again how do you keep that kind of scale?

This is indeed part of Exxon's publicly-stated strategy; they recognize that the demand for oil will peak once renewables, distribution, and storage technology are cheaper than the cost of extraction. There are already several solar power plants that were built because the unit economics made sense in those rare, outlier situations. This will become more widespread.

> The sheer mass of money in position to lobby for the "fossil fuel use is fine!" position dwarfs that of all other financially-fraught research questions put together.

Not only that but a very large number of people want to believe results like this are true. People are really scared to downgrade their lives and will resist at any cost. Clinging to delusional beliefs is one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Noting conflicts of interests makes sense, but the point of the article may still stand. Why is there no market force for extracting CO2? Do any emissions trading systems include folks who capture emissions and improve the "supply side" of the equation?

The US gives tax credits of $50/ton for underground storage and $30/ton for usage of the CO2.

So, about 5 cents per gallon of gas?

That is a complete joke.

Coal prices vary, but can be as low as $50/ton. If you set the price for carbon burial much higher than that, it enables a business model you might not want to encourage.

You mean burning coal and capturing carbon back to profit from the price spread?

I think they mean digging up coal and burying it in the ground again. Carbon captured, mission accomplished!

The current spot price for a short ton of coal is $40 [1], if it stays this low for a while, and the subsidy is in fact above that price, then watch out for some "business model innovation" in this space.

[1] http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/coal/5-year/

Its one of the higher non-gas tax incentive schemes in the world actually. Of course that's not saying much.

Not really. The influence:price ratio of academia is very high -- they can be bought very cheaply. It doesn't really take much to fund a study compared to the earnings of a big corporation. Tesla or similar could easily fund anti-fossil fuel studies and categorize them just as miscellaneous marketing expenses.

Are there other experts without conflicts of interest who have offered critical assessments of this research?

I agree that lay readers should be skeptical of experts with a vested interest in an outcome. But that doesn't mean we should be unduly pessimistic about research that has only positive evaluations (and is in Nature) as of yet — even if all of the experts who've weighed in have financial or other relationships on one side of the issue.

Really? I view this research as opening the way for laws mandating oil/gasoline producers reach carbon neutrality by funding/implementing mass carbon extraction as part of the cost of drilling.

Sure, they'll still be doing massive ecological harm with oil spills, disruptive drilling, fracking-related earthquakes/water reservoir contamination, and so on, but at least we won't bake ourselves to death, there's that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I would expect the opposite. If carbon sequestration is cheap, then it's not a big deal to demand that businesses purchase offsets to be carbon neutral.

But, I'm still skeptical because these sorts of breakthroughs are always overhyped. If it's real, the proof is in the pudding.

> The sheer mass of money in position to lobby for the "fossil fuel use is fine!"...

Please, let me play the role of the devil's advocate for a moment: fossil fuel use is fine! It MUST be fine!

Fossil fuel gives people cheap energy that used to come from muscles (human and animal) and, in particular, comfortable ways to move around, where you want, when you want.

People switched to fossil fuel as soon as possible because life got immediately enormously more joyful.

Global warming is two more Celsius degrees for average atmosphere temperature. Give me two degrees less each day and I'll give you back my car... just to ask it back the following day, and maybe I'll propose you to give a couple more degrees each day in exchange for no more whining about good old days' cars (nowadays labelled as "polluting" cars).

> The sheer mass of money in position to lobby for the "fossil fuel use is fine!"

I wish them all the best. At the end of the day Shell has come forward and indicated that renewable energy is best, despite their namesake. I'd own an EV if I could, but I can't: the next best is a hybrid. The two times I fill up a month I actively seek out Shell because of their stance. There are PR implications.

Imagine a world where fossil fuels are fine (not fossil really, but carbon). I have great and frankly revolutionary ideas surrounding easy and fast EV refills, but they are simply horrific in the face of turning electricity from renewables and atmospheric carbon into fuel.

My physics Spidey senses are tingling and this sounds too good to be true, but if it isn't: god speed.

Doesn't change anything. I still would take the method that produces no air pollutants as my number one choice. I also care about localised pollution from cars etc and not only climate change.

Doesn’t the anti-fossil fuel crowd have similar incentives?

Shouldn’t all studies be held with skepticism?

If the results were the opposite, people with ideological intent would be trumpeting this study as further confirmation of their own bias.

Basically it sounds like you are saying, “be skeptical of anything that goes against my deeply held beliefs because my cause is just while the other side is evil.”

Selective skepticism is a bad way to do science. Scientists should be skeptical of everything that doesn’t have repeatable experimental evidence.

Am I understanding your point correctly?

No. The anti-fossil-fuel movement, in general, doesn’t have tens of billions of dollars at their disposal. Deeply held beliefs may certainly influence scientific research, and that should be guarded against, but by itself it doesn’t let you buy scientists wholesale.

The diehard AGW "skeptic" needs just two simple maneuvers to counter any high-profile messenger warning about climate risks:

1) If the messenger has not invested their own money into efforts to reduce emissions, say "they won't put their money where their mouth is."

2) If the messenger has invested their own money into efforts to reduce emissions, say "they're just scaring people about climate to profit from their investments."

It's funny how people are still having these conversations on the eve of the bicentenary of climate science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fourier

I feel the controversy comes from the fact that one side has a large fund of money and is biased towards keeping things the way it is, whilst the other has significantly less funding and does not earn any money, or likely even significant benefits from the other side (mostly the young and poor will be affected, neither of which hold as much political clout).

All studies should be held with skepticism, but (assuming skepticism is a "resource" that can be exhausted), we should likely focus more of our skepticism on studies that clearly benefit from the result of the topic being discussed.

I object to the idea of limiting new carbon production is keeping the same. It is more like a victory. Solar continues to grow, and fossil fuel companies are being forced to come up with ways to make themselves carbon neutral. Sounds like a win.

Technically a good quarter with positive cash flows is profitable - even if the firm has been making losses for years.

The oil giants have helped suppress research, pervert justice and many other things to prevent this day.

It is here because the inevitability of reality makes it so.

I’m glad we are here, but we needed this 30 years ago.

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